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In the European Group March newsletter Vincenzo Ruggiero takes us through a history of crimes without criminals, the disappearance of offenders from the financial sphere, concluding with its structural ties to free market and the state. In the newsletter you will also find an article by David Scott discussing the secrecy surrounding the planned mega prisons in the UK.

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The title of our annual conference in 2017 is Uncovering Harms: States, Corporations and Organizations as Criminals. The December newsletter is dedicated to this topic through the focus on deaths and the accountability of states.

This conference believes that the French ‘burkini ban’ represents an Islamophobic assault on women’s right to choose what to wear. The ban is yet another case of the French authorities using the language of secularism and counter-terrorism to demonise Muslims – and particularly Muslim women. This includes a ban on the headscarf for public sector workers and on the wearing of religious symbols in schools. It is also part of a disturbing trend of racist and Islamophobic state policies and practices across Europe which seek to criminalise and demonise Muslims as an ‘enemy within’.

Warming up to the conference we have in this Newsletter an excellent investigation about what people think about punishment and about why we punish. Nina Padmanabhan in the article “Punishment, Just Because” provides clear suggestions and solid evidence that “old-school” critical criminological thoughts are still indeed very valid when discussing why we punish, why people think that we punish.

When the report "Drug Users in Prison: Norway’s experience and Bulgaria’s challenges" was released in Sofia, Bulgaria, this year, Hedda Giertsen gave a lecture on her findings for the report – the situation for drug users in Norwegian prisons.

We are looking forward to the new book “Emancipatory Politics and Praxis: An anthology of essays written for the European Group for the Study of Deviance and Social Control, 2013-16” from David Scott with Emma Bell, Joanna Gilmore, Helen Gosling, J M Moore and Faith Spear. The book will be released at the European Group annual conference in Braga in September.

This newsletter is dedicated to the memory of the Italian critical criminologist Massimo Pavarini (1947-2015) and the Venezuelan critical criminologist Lolita Aniyar de Castro (1937-2015), people who through their work and teaching have influenced generations of critical scholars

In the April newsletter we celebrate the first publication of the European Group’s own journal: ‘Justice, Power and Resistance: The Journal of the European Group for the Study of Deviance and Social control’. The European Group April newsletter can be downloaded here.